Three Reasons Why You Should Be Eagerly Awaiting SUSE Manager 3. Check it Out and Join the Beta Program.

According to a Forrester study, IT spends 70 percent of its budget on just maintaining its existing environment.

Many customers tell us this percentage is even higher in their organizations. The reason is that data centers have become increasingly complex. But a market-proven systems management solution, like SUSE Manager, can make our customers lives much easier. SUSE Manager includes everything a good system management solution should combine: asset management, provisioning, package and patch management, configuration management, redeployment options and bare metal provisioning. One of the biggest advantages of SUSE Manager is the ability to quickly, securely and efficiently manage and administer various Linux distributions with the same tool. And you can not just manage Linux systems: SUSE Manager also integrates with Microsoft System Center.

Many customers also tell us SUSE Manager is a great solution that significantly reduces their IT costs, gives them more time for other projects and provides greater security and stability in their Linux infrastructure. But we would not be SUSE if we would not strive to make something really good even better. We are heading now towards the SUSE Manager 3 release, scheduled for Q2 2016. With SUSE Manager 3, we are pushing three major themes, exciting technologies that will further enhance this unique Linux systems management solution:

1) Redesign of the Subscription Management component. SUSE Manager 3 will give you very detailed insights into your usage of SUSE Linux Enterprise. You can optimize your usage of SUSE subscriptions and make it really easy to create reports for physical servers AND virtual machines and Linux instances running in the cloud.

2) Integration of the new Icinga monitoring stack. Icinga is a modern monitoring server that is compatible with Nagios. This will be a very lightweight and loosely coupled integration that will take into account that some of our customer often have their own existing Nagios or proprietary monitoring solution that they want to use instead. With Icinga, you get an easy-to-use monitoring solution, but at the same time you have the flexibility to use what you already might have in-house. It is all about flexibility and choice.

3) And most important: a completely new configuration management approach with Salt from SaltStack. As of today SUSE supports both the Puppet and CFEngine configuration management tools on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12. Now we add the increasingly popular remote execution, orchestration and configuration management framework Salt. Salt comes with many advantages: It gives you a very scalable, fast and secure way of communicating with systems in real time; it allows you to collect system status about installed packages, configuration files etc. in a very efficient way; it has a very easy to use and easy to extend system of so-called “state files” that allow you to hierarchically describe the configuration of your systems; and we can automate and orchestrate cloud deployments and Docker containers.

But the biggest advantage probably is that Salt allows you to move from scheduling jobs on systems to real-time configuration management and monitoring. This means that, while today it can still take some time until a SUSE Manager server has patched hundreds or even thousands of servers in huge customer environments, with Salt this will improve massively thanks to two special features which are:

a) Salt executes commands on many servers in parallel.

b) Salt can react itself on events with its integrated “Reactor” system.

In the future, with Salt, scenarios such as orchestrating servers in an event-driven infrastructure (i.e., where a change on one server can trigger a configuration change on another or even the start of new server instances) to real-time monitoring and security compliance and even “self-healing” IT landscapes will be possible.

If you want to be among the first to check out the upcoming SUSE Manager 3 release, watch this video and think about joining the beta program which will start mid of December. Just contact your local SUSE sales representative to learn how to participate.